PARLIAMENT spent as much time on Monday arguing about Batman at the Palace as it did debating changes to Child Support Agency procedure. Admittedly the new CSA regulations were minor, but small changes can make a big difference to people’s lives. Not in Buckingham Palace, perhaps, but in the real world.

Parliament rarely finds time to debate the CSA at all. The agency has become unmentionable. The annual report into the Government’s drive to tackle poverty, published as a shiny magazine by the Department for Work and Pensions on Monday, mentioned the CSA a whole two times. In 238 pages. Twice. And one of them was in brackets. “Children need the best possible start in life so they can flourish,” gushed the report.

Back in the Commons, Margaret Hodge was gushing, too. The minister for children was “delighted” to be presenting the Children Bill. The Bill creates Local Safeguarding Children Boards, a Children’s Trust, and a Children’s Commissioner to do God knows what — “draw on children’s views . . . advise Government and engage with others . . . work with relevant ombudsmen and statutory bodies to ensure complaints systems are in place and are effective and child friendly.” What a load of rubbish.

The agenda, Mrs Hodge told the Commons, “is driven by the outcomes that children themselves told us matter. We consulted them widely and they told us that they want to be healthy, to stay safe, to enjoy themselves and to achieve, to make a positive contribution to society and to achieve economic well-being.” What funny language children use these days.

Does the Bill mention the CSA? No. Did Mrs Hodge, on her feet for 52 minutes, mention the CSA? Nope. Has the minister for children ever talked about the CSA? Not that her department could recall. Nobody talks about the CSA because it is a catastrophe. And it is a catastrophe that directly affects the poorest people in the country, lone parents. According to its annual report, the CSA owes a massive £976 million to these people; well over twice the amount that the agency actually paid out to parents with care last year.

The CSA is hopeless. A quarter of parents, nearly always mothers, who apply for maintenance receive none at all, while another 20 per cent get less than they are entitled to. And these are not huge amounts: the average per child is £16 a week, a small payment which might make an enormous difference.

As well as the £976 million that the CSA has calculated is owed and believes it can recover from absent parents, there is a further £1 billion that it writes off as unrecoverable. Were the Inland Revenue to be owed £2 billion it would damn well go and get it. But because this is owed to the poorest people in the country, nobody does a thing about it.

If the CSA is failing the vulnerable, it is also doing it very expensively. Its operating costs are an astonishing 54p per £1 collected. The Inland Revenue’s, by contrast, are 1.11p per £1.

A new £456 million computer system at the CSA does not work. A simpler maintenance calculation scheme, introduced last year, has somehow ended up even less efficient than the old system. Of 300,000 applications made under the new scheme, around half have not even had calculations done yet. The backlog is building up at the rate of 30,000 new cases every three months. Figures are very hard to come by as the CSA has no accurate records, but a conservative estimate suggests that at least

250,000 families, under the new scheme and the old, are receiving no maintenance at all.

They cannot even get through to talk to anyone about it. Nearly a third of telephone calls to the agency are “abandoned” by staff. The phone system diverts calls to any centre where there is somebody available to answer, so that callers end up speaking to people who know nothing about their case. And this affects a lot of people: the CSA deals with two million parents and 1.5 million children, or one in 17 people in Britain.

Although the staff clearly cannot cope already, a quarter of the 10,000 employees may be under threat as the Department for Work and Pensions tries to shed 30,000 jobs. How is that £976 million going to be tracked down then? The jargon and managerial garbage in the CSA’s annual report cannot quite smother the misery. The agency may not be able to work out how many parents need help, but it does know that 2.5 per cent of its workforce are registered disabled. It ran a “substantial disability awareness programme” last year. Very useful. Over half of office waste was recycled, and “all of our major sites have developed a green travel plan”. Goodo.

Staff may not have answered calls, but they did sit as school governors, brought their children to work, and helped out in the magistrate service and with the Prince’s Trust. They also took an average of 15.6 days off sick. One in seven resigned.

The CSA annual report was published the day the Commons rose for its summer recess. Had ministers been forced to account for the farrago, they would simply have blamed the new computer system. That isn’t the point. The Government should be guaranteeing maintenance payments. The charity One Parent Families wants the State to pay the maintenance due, once it has been calculated, and then reclaim the money from the absent parent.

If ministers weren’t wasting their time publishing glossy magazines about the fight against poverty, creating absurd children’s commissioners, or chasing a foxhunting ban around Westminster, perhaps they might care to consider it. Or maybe a few of the hard-pressed mothers should climb into Buckingham Palace. That might get them noticed. But then, they probably cannot spare the time to get to London, or the money.

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